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Poet Mark Strand first Hamill lecturer
Boundaries between poetry and painting doubly crossed
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand reading his poetry at BU in 2000. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Comparisons between poetry and painting go back a long way. “Ut pictura poesis (As is painting, so is poetry),” wrote Latin lyric poet Horace (65-8 b.c.) in his epistle Ars Poetica.
Exactly how much do the two art forms relate to each other? On October 14, Pulitzer-winning author and former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand will talk about the parallels between painting and poetry. The lecture, entitled An Inside Story, is part of a lecture series named in honor of CFA school of visual arts alumnus Tim Hamill (CFA’65,’68), director of the Hamill Gallery of African Art in Boston.
“The purpose of the lectures is to present artists who talk about crossing boundaries among artistic disciplines,” says Judith Simpson, school of visual arts director. “Mark Strand is an obvious and exciting choice for the inaugural Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture because he is not only a poet, an author, and a teacher, but an artist and an art critic. He’s a true Renaissance man.”
Strand, who was named poet laureate in 1990 and received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for his book Blizzard of One, has edited several anthologies, including Art of the Real: Nine American Figurative Painters. He has also published numerous articles and essays on painting and photography, as well as books on artists Edward Hopper and William Bailey. He won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1974 for The Story of Our Lives, and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1987. He has also written a book of short stories.
Strand visited BU in 2000 for a poetry reading, which included a pair of villanelles from Blizzard of One inspired by the paintings of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, and a poem dedicated to painter Neil Welliver. In fact, he credits Welliver with driving him from painting: as a graduate student of painting at Yale in the mid-1950s, studying under abstract painter, printmaker, and photographer Josef Albers, he saw a Welliver painting and wondered if he had made a mistake by pursuing painting. “Well, I had,” Strand concluded.
Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English, and also a former national poet laureate and Guggeheim fellow, says that Strand’s poetry is “plangent while amused, daring and emotional, with a kind of calm poise,” and that those qualities “are related to the fact that Mark Strand is also a wonderful painter.” He says that the similarities between poetry and visual art go beyond being forms of descriptive composition. “I think the connection is deeper and more conceptual than that,” he says, “a matter of revelation emerging from a perfection of form . . . Mark’s poems are worlds within their own laws, as I understand paintings to be.”
Simpson says that Strand’s visits to BU go back more than 30 years: in December 1972 he was commissioned by his friend John Arthur, who was then curator of the BU Art Gallery, to write a poem on some aspect of the works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). Strand wrote the poem “She,” based on the artist’s “Elles” series of 11 color lithographs that were at the core of the 100 graphics being exhibited at the gallery that month.
Strand also came to BU for a reading in 1990 and was introduced by another poet-painter, his friend Derek Walcott, a CAS professor of creative writing and the 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. Blizzard of One’s final poem is dedicated to Walcott, and both artists exhibited paintings together at a show at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., in 1999.
Many poets throughout history, including William Blake and e.e. cummings, not only have displayed a painterly eye for detail in their poetry, but also have felt the need to switch art forms on occasion. After all, both poetry and painting have harmony, color, rhythm, and structure. Strand once commented that “painting is an escape from an intensely verbal life.”
“Mark Strand is the epitome of a man who has lived in the synergistic world of images and words,” says Simpson. “He can offer firsthand experiences about crossing disciplines and can broaden perspectives on both poetry and art.”
The inaugural Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture, An Inside Story, by Mark Strand, is on Thursday, October 14, at 6 p.m. in the SMG Auditorium. A reception follows in the SMG Executive Leadership Center at 7 p.m. The events are free and open to the public.
8
October 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations